East of St. Louis: John Steinbeck, Eugene V. Debs, And Celebrating the Labor Movement in Terre Haute

December 7, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Image of Eugene V. Debs
Though Eugene V. Debs is no longer a household name, John Steinbeck’s labor movement novels of the 1930s—In Dubious Battle and  The Grapes of Wrath—were influenced by the words and witness of the progressive politician from Terre Haute, Indiana who ran for President in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920. Debs devoted his career to organizing the fight for better wages and working conditions; Steinbeck appropriated his statement of support for the mistreated, malnourished, and marginalized in society—“While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free”—in the promise Tom Joad makes to his mother in The Grapes of Wrath. Debs uttered his statement in 1918, to the Cleveland, Ohio court that had convicted him of sedition for a speech he gave in Canton, Ohio protesting America’s entry into World War I—a war about which Steinbeck expressed misgivings 25 years later, in East of Eden. Despite repeated defeats during their lifetimes, Debs and Steinbeck remained optimistic about the future of humankind. In his 1962 Nobel acceptance speech, Steinbeck captured Debs’s faith in the possibility—and necessity—of human progress: “I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”

Image of Pete Seeger

Eugene V. Debs died in Illinois in 1926, but his memory lives on in the work of the Eugene V. Debs Foundation, located in Terre Haute, Indiana, the city where Debs was born. The not-for-profit organization operates the Eugene V. Debs museum and gives an award each year in Debs’s name to recognize the contributions of outstanding individuals to the cause, much like the John Steinbeck humanitarian award given by the Steinbeck Studies Center in San Jose, California. The 2015 Debs award was made to James Boland, president of the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers, at a banquet in Terre Haute on October 14. Pete Seeger, the labor movement troubadour honored by the John Steinbeck center in 2009, received the Eugene V. Debs award in 1979.

Image of Mother Jones

My family and I have been attending Debs award dinners almost that long, and I was pleased to see the Mother Jones Museum represented at this year’s banquet. Mary Harris Jones—a labor movement activist and community organizer in the same era as Eugene V. Debs—was an Irish immigrant, like James Boland and John Steinbeck’s grandparents, Samuel and Eliza Hamilton. Jones was called “the most dangerous woman in America” by critics; like Debs and Steinbeck, she had many, and she was an avid defender of immigrant and worker rights, like Debs and Steinbeck. There is probably no better parallel in modern American literature to the contemporary situation of undocumented workers in the U.S. than Steinbeck’s “Okie” migrants in The Grapes of Wrath. Mother Jones Magazine, a progressive publication, is headquartered in San Francisco, the center of the California labor movement in Steinbeck’s time and the backdrop for Steinbeck’s strike novel, In Dubious Battle.

Image of Dana Lyons's "Great Coal Train Tour"

Since the year the Debs award was given to Pete Seeger, almost every Debs dinner has featured a musician of note on the program. This year’s singer was Dana Lyons, a folk and alternative rock musician from Bellingham, Washington. Many of Dana’s songs concern the environment, but he is most famous for “Cows with Guns,” a hilarious song about another serious subject. John Steinbeck would have appreciated Dana’s sense of humor, as well as the environmental message delivered in the beautiful new music video, “The Great Salish Sea,” which can be viewed at Dana’s website. It sounds the alarm about the effects ship noise and fossil fuels have on the whales of the Salish Sea region in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia—a region John Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts, early ecologists, knew well.

Image of Keith Mestrich, CEO of Amalgamated Bank
Another Debs dinner tradition is to have the annual award presented by a prominent proponent of progressive politics. This year’s presentation speaker was Keith Mestrich, president and CEO of Amalgamated Bank, the union-owned bank where Occupy Wall Street kept its funds. Founded in 1923 by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the bank practices what Eugene V. Debs preached. Recently it raised the minimum wage it pays its employees to $15 an hour, and it is currently funding an ad campaign on New York subways supporting “ The Fight for $15.” When metro officials pulled the bank’s posters from subway cars because the message was too political, Amalgamated ran an ad on the front cover of the free subway paper, and Amalgamated volunteers began collecting signatures for the #RaiseTheWage petition the bank plans to send Congress.

Image of James Boland, president of International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers

In his remarks, Jim Boland (shown here speaking on TV) cited the influence of progressive writers on his political education, recalling how he felt as a young Irish immigrant to the United States to learn about Eugene V. Debs, the man he called “the ultimate American socialist.” Boland’s father and grandfather were union railroad workers, like Debs and my Irish grandfather, a political activist and socialist. During his speech, Jim cited two writers—John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck’s American contemporary, and James Connolly, the Irish socialist and patriot who was wounded in the 1916 Easter Uprising, then executed for his role in the Irish revolt against British rule. Before returning to Ireland from the United States in 1910 to fight for Irish independence, Connolly was a member of the International Workers of the World (IWW), the union that Debs helped found and that Steinbeck wrote about in the 1930s.

Image of the Eugene V. Debs home in Terre Haute, Indiana
Unlike James Connolly and Eugene V. Debs, John Steinbeck was never jailed because of his politics. But people do die for their convictions in his novels—Casy in The Grapes of Wrath; the young strike organizer, also named Jim, in Steinbeck’s labor movement novel In Dubious Battle. Unlike Steinbeck, Debs is rarely mentioned in American classrooms today. In fact, the contribution of the entire labor movement to the making of American society is barely touched on in most high school history classes. The corporate media treat labor unions and leaders with suspicion, and politicians love to campaign against both, even in states like Indiana with strong labor movement roots. In Terre Haute, the Eugene V. Debs Foundation is working to counter this negative trend. Visitors are welcome at the Eugene V. Debs Museum, which is located on the campus of Indiana State University in Terre Haute. Tips on traveling to Terre Haute and visiting the museum are available on my travel blog.

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“The Valley of the World”: John Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley in Color Photography Inspired by East of Eden

December 2, 2015 by 7 Comments

Composite image of East of Eden photos by David A. Laws

More than 60 years after it became a national bestseller, John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden remains one of the writer’s most widely read works of fiction. Set in California’s Salinas Valley, where the author grew up and is buried, East of Eden recreates a turbulent era in American life, the period from the Civil War to World War I, through two generations of a pair of Salinas Valley families whose individual lives intersect dramatically during an era characterized by change and conflict in the Salinas Valley and on the world stage. In describing the novel’s setting as “the valley of the world,” John Steinbeck clearly meant East of Eden to be read as allegory, like the Old Testament story mirrored in its title, and as autobiography—intended, he said, for his two young sons, growing up far from the Salinas Valley after World War II. In 2010, the Steinbeck scholar Michael J. Meyer asked David A. Laws, a gifted photographer known for his bright images of John Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley, to take a series of photos to illustrate a book of literary essays on East of Eden. Meyer died in 2011, but the process of collecting and editing essays by various scholars of John Steinbeck was picked up and completed by Henry Veggian, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The result was East of Eden: New and Recent Essays, published by Editions Rodopi (now Brill) in 2013 and reviewed here.—Ed.

Images of the Salinas Valley Inspired by East of Eden

My contribution to East of Eden: New and Recent Essays appeared as a black-and-white photo essay—“Literary Landmarks of East of Eden”—comprised of 15 images that I look of locations around the Salinas Valley inspired by passages from John Steinbeck’s epic novel. The text I wrote remains the copyright of Rodopi, but I retained ownership of the following images, published here for the first time from my original color files. Although much has changed since John Steinbeck returned to his hometown in the early 1950s to recall the “sights and sounds, smells and colors” of the Salinas Valley that fill East of Eden, and even more since Adam Trask arrived in search of his own Eden, these images are recent examples of the scenes and settings that informed the author and that continue to convey the essence of those times. Page references quoting the novel are from the edition of East of Eden published by Penguin Books in 2002, John Steinbeck’s centennial.—David A. Laws

Image of ranch in the Gabilan Mountains by David A. Laws

Ranch in the “wilder” foothills of the Gabilan Mountains

“I would like to write the story of this whole valley, of all the little towns and all the farms and ranches in the wilder hills.”—Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, ed. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (Penguin Books, 1976), p. 73

Image of Fremont Peak by David A. Laws

Fremont Peak from Elkhorn Slough, Moss Landing

“The river mouth at Moss Landing was centuries ago the entrance to this long inland water.”—East of Eden, p. 4

Image of Monterey County Courthouse bas-relief by David A. Laws

Bas-relief sculpture by Jo Mora, Monterey County Courthouse, Salinas

“Then the hard, dry Spaniards came exploring through, greedy and realistic. . . . Of course they were religious people, and the men who could read and write, who kept the records and drew the maps, were the tough untiring priests who traveled with the soldiers.”—East of Eden, p. 6

Image of King City ranch by David A. Laws

Dwarfed oaks near the Hamilton’s “old starvation ranch,” King City

“There were no springs, and the crust of topsoil was so thin that the flinty bones stuck through. Even the sagebrush struggled to exist, and the oaks were dwarfed from lack of moisture.”—East of Eden, p. 9

Image of Plaza Hall in San Juan Bautista by David A. Laws

The Plaza Hall in San Juan Bautista played the role of the King City hotel in the 1981 “East of Eden” TV mini-series.

“One morning she complained of feeling ill and stayed in her room in the King City hotel while Adam drove into the country. He returned about five in the afternoon to find her nearly dead from loss of blood.”—East of Eden, p. 133

Image of live oaks on Salinas ranch by David A. Laws

Live oaks shade the road to the entrance of a ranch on Williams Road, Salinas.

“Later Samuel and Adam walked down the oak-shadowed road to the entrance to the draw where they could look out at the Salinas Valley.”—East of Eden, p. 293

Image of Highway 198 near San Lucas by David A. Laws

Tracks to the “worn and rutted hills,” Highway 198 near San Lucas

“They left the valley road and drove into the worn and rutted hills over a set of wheel tracks gullied by the winter rains. The horses strained into their collars and the buckboard rocked and swayed. The year had not been kind to the hills, and already in June they were dry.”—East of Eden, p. 137

Image of field worker mural near Salinas by David A. Laws

John Cerney’s field worker mural at The Farm, Highway 68, Salinas

“’This will be a valley of great richness one day. It could feed the world, and maybe it will.’”—East of Eden, p. 145

Image of La Gloria Schoolhouse, King City, by David A. Laws

La Gloria Schoolhouse, Monterey County Agricultural and Rural Life Museum, King City

“In the country the repository of art and science was the school, and the schoolteacher shielded and carried the torch of learning and of beauty. The schoolhouse was the meeting place for music, for debate. The polls were set in the schoolhouse for elections. Social life, whether it was the crowning of a May queen, the eulogy to a dead president, or an all-night dance, could be held nowhere else.”—East of Eden, p. 146

Image of eucalyptus windbreak near Greenfield by David A. Laws

Eucalyptus gum-tree windbreak near Greenfield

“’I don’t know whether you noticed, but a little farther up the valley they’re planting windbreaks of gum trees. Eucalyptus—comes from Australia. They say the gums grow ten feet a year.’”—East of Eden, p. 164

Image of former Monterey County Bank Building by David A. Laws

Former Monterey County Bank building, Main Street, Salinas

“At eight-thirty on a Wednesday morning Kate walked up Main Street, climbed the stairs of the Monterey County Bank Building, and walked along the corridor until she found the door which said, ‘Dr. Wilde—Office Hours 11-2.’”—East of Eden, pp. 240-241

Image of Garden of Memories Cemetary, Salinas, by David A. Laws

Samuel Hamilton family plot, Garden of Memories Cemetery, Salinas

“The traditional dark cypresses wept around the edge of the cemetery, and white violets ran wild in the pathways. . . . The cold wind blew over the tombstones and cried in the cypresses.”—East of Eden, p. 309

Image of Los Coches Adobe, Soledad, by David A. Laws

Boarded–up Los Coches Adobe, Arroyo Seco Road, Soledad

“The ‘dobe house had entered its second decay. The great sala all along the front was half plastered, the line of white halfway around and then stopping, just as the workmen had left it ten years before. . . . A smell of mildew and of wet paper was in the air.”—East of Eden, pp. 342-343

Image of the Steinbeck House in Salinas by David A. Laws

The Steinbeck House, 132 Central Avenue, Salinas

“When Adam left Kate’s place he had over two hours to wait for the train back to King City. On an impulse he turned off Main Street and walked up Central Avenue to number 130, the high white house of Ernest Steinbeck. It was an immaculate and friendly house, grand enough but not pretentious, and it sat inside its white fence, surrounded by its clipped lawn, and roses and catoneasters lapped against its white walls.”—East of Eden, p. 382

Image of Alisal Creek at Old Stage Road, Salinas, by David A. Laws

Alisal Creek at Old Stage Road, Salinas

“It’s a pleasant little stream that gurgles through the Alisal against the Gabilan Mountains on the east of the Salinas Valley. The water bumbles over round stones and washes the polished roots of the trees that hold it in.”—East of Eden, p. 589

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California’s Wild Edge: History, Poetry, and Art of Steinbeck’s California Coast

November 1, 2015 by 3 Comments

Cover image of California's Wild Edge, by Tom Killion with Gary Snyder

The Central California coast from Big Sur to Monterey Bay has become synonymous with John Steinbeck and Robinson Jeffers, the iconic poet of the California coast who lived in Carmel from 1913 until his death in 1962 and influenced Steinbeck’s writing in the 1930s. In California’s Wild Edge: The Coast in Poetry, Prints, and History, the California artist Tom Killion reinterprets the landscape of Jeffers and Steinbeck’s California coast in image, poetry, and narrative uniquely suited to today’s ecology-minded audience. Influenced by the East Coast artist and author Rockwell Kent, a contemporary of Jeffers and Steinbeck, and by the art of Japan, a country that Steinbeck wrote about and visited, Killion has developed over a period of four decades a distinctive style of wood and linocut printmaking that perfectly serves the subject of his most recent book. Like Kent, he is a visionary artist with an eye for arresting image, lyrical text, and their marriage in beautiful books with popular appeal. In California’s Wild Edge, the Pulitzer Prize-winning California poet Gary Snyder—Killion’s mentor, friend, and collaborator—continues to be an essential source of inspiration, ideas, and information about the mystical topography and extraordinary ecology of the state celebrated in Killion’s art.

Image of Pt. Lobos, Carmel Bay, 2014, by Tom Killion

The Perspective from Point Reyes

Image of Tom KillionRockwell Kent’s work was inspired by the rugged terrain of Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine, where Kent lived from 1905 to 1910. Tom Killion has a similar relationship to Mount Tamalpais in California’s Marin County, where he grew up in the 1950s and 60s, and to Point Reyes, the isolated preserve on the Marin coast where he now lives and works. He became interested in book printing and poetry as a history major at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the 1970s. After graduation he traveled in Europe and Africa, returning to Santa Cruz to establish Quail Press before earning a PhD in African history at Stanford, the university Steinbeck attended but never finished. His first book, 28 Views of Mount Tamalpais, was published in 1975. Fortress Marin, his second, appeared in 1977, and The Coast of California: Point Reyes to Point Sur, his third, in 1979. During the 1980s he conducted historical research in Africa, administered a medical relief program in Sudan, traveled with nationalist rebels in Eritrea, and completed his fourth book, Walls: A Journey Across Three Continents (1990), which combines travel narrative with woodcut illustrations, as Rockwell Kent did in his books about wild, unpopulated places. In retrospect, Killion’s purpose as an emerging artist was clear early in his career: celebrating the human and natural ecology of people and places outside the mainstream of modern society, like Kent, an equally intrepid explorer.

Image of Big Sur Spring Sunset, 1990, by Tom Killion

Gary Snyder, Poet Laureate of Deep Ecology

Image of Gary SnyderKillion taught history at Bowdoin College in Maine from 1990 to 1994, traveled to Eritrea as a Fulbright scholar in 1994, and returned to California in 1995 to teach at San Francisco State University. His collaboration with the San Francisco Renaissance writer and environmental activist Gary Snyder, “the poet laureate of deep ecology,” resulted in three volumes of art and text devoted to California’s legendary landscape, all published by San Francisco’s Heyday Books: The High Sierra of California (2002), Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History, and Print (2009), and California’s Wild Edge (2015).  Like John Steinbeck, Gary Snyder is a California native of Scots-Irish, German, and English ancestry with a worldwide reputation as an author and advocate on global issues. His progressive politics and activism, like Steinbeck’s, angered officials in Washington, D.C., and caused similar problems in his life. Like Steinbeck, he used his experience as a manual laborer in his early writing. Later he studied East Asian art and literature, lived and traveled in Japan, and became associated with the Beat movement centered in mid-century San Francisco. He received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize in poetry following the publication of Turtle Island, a book of poems and essays exploring humanity-in-nature from a holistic perspective similar to Steinbeck’s in Sea of Cortez. The spiritual dimension of environmentalism, East Asia, and the California coast and landscape informs his seven-decade career as a writer, one that bridges the generations of John Steinbeck and Tom Killion.

Image of Monterey Bay from Santa Cruz Pogonip, 2012, by Tom Killion

The California Coast from Big Sur to Cape Mendocino

Image of Point Reyes from McClure's Beach, 1979, by Tom KillionThe art of California’s Wild Edge, Killion and Snyder’s third collaboration, is breathtaking. Its text—a fusion of natural and human history, poems and journal entries by various writers, and personal memoir—constitutes a mini-course in California culture that delights and surprises at every turn. Before “Anglo-Californian” coastal poetry there was “the poetry of naming,” colonial Spain’s greatest contribution to California, and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, “the finest account of the coast ever written from the perspective of the sea.” The story of Big Sur, the most dramatic episode in the history of the California coast, is told through the life and writing of the colorful character Jaime de Angulo, and literary figures—including Robinson Jeffers, Jack London, and the poet George Sterling—attracted to Carmel, north of Big Sur, after the 1906 earthquake. Largely forgotten today, Sterling was born in Sag Harbor, New York—where Steinbeck later lived—and committed suicide by swallowing the cyanide pill he kept for the purpose, like Cathy in Steinbeck’s East of Eden, during a depression caused by his decline in fame and fortune in San Francisco. Not surprisingly, San Francisco serves as source, context, and symbol for much of Killion’s history of California coastal poetry, from the native peoples of the coast to Bret Harte and Robert Duncan, the “mystical poet and pioneer of gay civil rights” who, with Snyder and other San Francisco literary lights, created the city’s modern literary renaissance.

Image of Cape Mendocino, 2014, by Tom KillionBut personal memories, not literary history, comprise the heart of Killion’s narrative—of a grandmother who left lonely Eureka, California for San Francisco in 1906 and survived the earthquake; of hiking Mount Tamalpais as a boy and biking from his parents’ home in Mill Valley as far north as Eureka and as far south as Santa Cruz; of helping clean up the 1971 Golden Gate oil spill that sparked Marin’s successful anti-development movement; of attending college in Santa Cruz, the embodiment of California coast culture, north and south; of returning to Marin County to live and work near unspoiled Point Reyes, “which projects father into the sea from the main axis of the California coast than any other point.” The “redwood coast” from Big Sur north to Humboldt Bay dominates Killion’s story because, he says, it’s less populated than Southern California and more dramatic. It’s the same California coast that engaged John Steinbeck in his much of his writing. The original setting of his second novel, To a God Unknown, was Mendocino County, and the 1955 movie adaptation of East of Eden was filmed in Mendocino—a stand-in, as Killion notes, for Monterey. Steinbeck liked to say he could take or leave the mountains, but had to live near the sea—the setting for his first novel, Cup of Gold, and for The Winter of Our Discontent, his last. Though neither novel is about California, each one has the unforgettable feel of the California coast between Santa Cruz and Big Sur where Steinbeck spent his happiest years—a rich source of history, poetry, and art from pre-Spanish times to the present. California’s Wild Edge captures the subject splendidly.

Images from California’s Wild Edge ©Tom Killion 2015.

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Salinas, California Stretch of Highway 101 Named for John Steinbeck Earlier This Week

October 27, 2015 by 2 Comments

Image of John Steinbeck Highway 101 sign

John Steinbeck liked to travel and learned to drive while growing up in Salinas, California, where a stretch of nearby Highway 101 was officially named for the author of Travels with Charley at an October 26 ceremony in Steinbeck’s hometown. Legislation naming the John Steinbeck Highway portion of Highway 101—from the Espinosa Road/Russell Road undercrossing to John Street in downtown Salinas—passed the California State Assembly last year as part of a bill designating other sections of Highway 101, including Gateway to the Pinnacles Highway. Appropriately, the John Steinbeck Highway sign was unveiled at the National Steinbeck Center, located on the historic Salinas, California main street accessed from Highway 101 at the “National Steinbeck Center” exit familiar to visitors since the building opened two decades ago. Said Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw, director of the busy Salinas, California center, “John Steinbeck loved cars” and owned a Packard, a Jaguar, a Buick, even a rare European car. “In nearly all of his books, cars roll along highways—including two of his best road books: Travels with Charley and The Grapes of Wrath.”

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“This Old House” Means Conservation—and Care for Art and Ecology—in John Steinbeck’s Pacific Grove

October 20, 2015 by 2 Comments

Postcard image of 1908 Carnegie library in Pacific Grove, California
Pacific Grove, California—John Steinbeck’s retreat when there was writing or healing to be done—is a preservation-minded community where “this old house” means the whole town, and residents like Nancy and Steve Hauk, celebrity-citizens with ties to Steinbeck, contribute to the present while connecting with the past. Founded in 1875 as a seaside getaway for camp-meeting Methodists, one where liquor was outlawed and modesty was mandated, Pacific Grove soon became a summer destination—Chautauqua West—for vacationing non-Methodists from inland towns such as Salinas.

Founded in 1875 as a seaside getaway for camp-meeting Methodists, one where liquor was outlawed and modesty was mandated, Pacific Grove soon became a summer destination—Chautauqua West—for vacationing non-Methodists from inland towns such as Salinas.

Steinbeck’s parents liked Pacific Grove’s culture and cool air; their modest weekend cottage off Central Avenue on 11th Street had a view of the bay when Steinbeck was a boy. In 1906 Pacific Grove got a grant to build a Carnegie library on Central, within walking distance of the Steinbeck cottage, where Steinbeck’s wife Carol Henning is thought to have worked in the early 1930s. Steinbeck’s friend Ed Ricketts lived in a handsome house up the hill from Central Avenue on Lighthouse, the other major thoroughfare—until Ed’s wife left him and he moved to lab space he rented for his struggling marine specimen business between Lighthouse and Central avenues. Now located on busy Cannery Row, where peaceful Pacific Grove meets fun-loving Monterey, “Doc’s Lab” attracted legendary people and parties in the 1930s and 40s, achieving the stature of myth in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row fiction.

Image of Ricketts-Hauk home in Pacific Grove, California

Nancy Hauk, an artist, and Steve Hauk, a writer, own the Ricketts home today. Together they operate Hauk Fine Arts, an intimate art gallery less than a block from Holman’s Department Store, another Pacific Grove landmark made famous by Steinbeck’s fiction. A playwright, Steve recently completed “Almost True Stories from a Writer’s Life,” a series of short stories based on relationships and events from Steinbeck’s life in Pacific Grove, Monterey, and Salinas. One story, “The Daughter,” is set in the Ricketts house. Another features Bruce and Jean Ariss, artists who lived in Pacific Grove during Steinbeck’s time and moved in the colorful Ricketts-Steinbeck circle. Steve is an expert on California artists, and the gallery features paintings by friends of Steinbeck, including Bruce Ariss, inspired by the life and landscape of Pacific Grove, Carmel, and Monterey Bay. Visitors to Hauk Fine Arts who are willing to take up the time freely given by Steve, a former reporter for the Monterey Herald, get an instant education in Steinbeck, Pacific Grove, and the town’s this-old-house history.

Pacific Grove Library Honors Hauks with an Art Gallery

Image of Steve and Nancy Hauk at Pacific Grove Library announcementThe Hauks love Pacific Grove, and Pacific Grove loves them in return. Earlier this year officials announced that new gallery space in the Pacific Grove Public Library would be named in honor of the couple, a tribute to Nancy’s art and Steve’s devotion to his wife, who suffers from a progressive neurological disease. Friends of the Library, a volunteer group that gets things done, raised funds to build out the space, part of a long-term program to upgrade and restore the aging Carnegie library to its former glory. Located a stone’s throw from the sea in a neighborhood of immaculate Victorian homes and historic public buildings including Chautauqua Hall, the library was and is a gathering place for Pacific Grove, where culture continues to attract visitors like butterflies. An art exhibit and lecture series celebrating Rachel Carson’s 1955 book about coastal ecology, The Edge of the Sea, will feature the Carson and Steinbeck biographer William Souder on December 4.

Located a stone’s throw from the sea in a neighborhood of immaculate Victorian homes and historic public buildings including Chautauqua Hall, the library was and is a gathering place for Pacific Grove, where culture continues to attract visitors like butterflies.

Image of the new gallery sign at the Pacific Grove LibraryThe Nancy and Steve Hauk Gallery formally opened at a Friends of the Library reception—attended by fellow artists and community members, and the Hauks’ younger daughter Anne—on October 2, 2015. The library’s Rachel Carson exhibit opened the same day, a meaningful coincidence on many levels. The Methodists who founded Pacific Grove may have been teetotalers, but they were thirsty for knowledge and curious about ideas, art, and science, subjects that defined the summer Chautauqua circuit with its West Coast center in Pacific Grove more than a century ago.

The Methodists who founded Pacific Grove may have been teetotalers, but they were thirsty for knowledge and curious about ideas, art, and science, subjects that defined the summer Chautauqua circuit with its West Coast center in Pacific Grove more than a century ago.

Like Ed Ricketts, Rachel Carson was a scientist; like Ricketts and Steinbeck, she thought deeply and wrote prophetically about ecology. The Sea Around Us (1950), The Edge of the Sea, and Silent Spring (1962), popular books that have become classics, equal Steinbeck in style and Ricketts in observation. Nancy Hauk paints with similar grace and perception about similar subjects—seabirds on the sand, water reeds reflected in a tide pool, the gentle golden hills described by Steinbeck in his best writing about California. Like Steinbeck, Nancy rarely repeats herself in her work, and Steve is still finding sketches and paintings—some completed, others left unfinished—in their house on Lighthouse Avenue.

A Piece of This-Old-House from Steinbeck’s Pacific Grove

Image of Steinbeck family cottage in Pacific Grove, CaliforniaNancy and Steve are walkers in a walking town. Since Nancy’s move to memory care at Cottages of Carmel, where she often can be found with caregiver and friend Yolanda Campos, Steve’s been doing more driving than walking, daily making the drive to visit Nancy over Carmel Hill, a trip Mac and the Boys made to hunt frogs in Cannery Row. One day recently he walked by the Steinbeck family cottage off Central Avenue in Pacific Grove and noticed a dumpster loaded with wood that had been removed for replacement in the process of retrofitting the cottage. “This old house,” he said, “witnessed so much history, and writing. I salvaged three pieces of redwood siding from the dumpster, just in case. I’m glad I did. When I drove by the next day the dumpster was gone.” Thanks to Steve’s care for John Steinbeck, Pacific Grove, and posterity, a piece of the famous cottage has joined the collection of Steinbeck memorabilia at the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, one that includes Steinbeck’s typewriter and the manuscripts of books the author wrote while living—and healing—in the place he loved.

Photo of Ricketts-Hauk home in Pacific Grove courtesy David Laws.

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Timely Topic: John Steinbeck As an International Writer— Planners Invite Proposals for Papers at 2016 Conference in San Jose, California

September 16, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Composite image of John Steinbeck and earth map

In a 1946 letter, John Steinbeck described arriving in Denmark to find “thirty cameramen with flashlights . . . . I didn’t know anyone treated writers like this.” He later observed that Denmark was the only country in the world to keep all his books in print. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, the John Steinbeck Society of Japan boasts one of the strongest memberships of any foreign author society dedicated to an American author, with annual conferences and a peer-edited scholarly journal. If any 20th-century American author can be considered an “international” writer, it is Steinbeck.

International Society of Steinbeck Scholars Goes Global

The International Society of Steinbeck Scholars is planning to examine Steinbeck as an international writer in a May 4-6, 2016 conference to be held at the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University in San Jose, California. Proposals are being accepted now through February 2016 for papers on a wide variety of theoretical applications, such as Steinbeck’s connections to world literature and world thought—for example, Classical Greek and Roman, Eastern, and twentieth-century Russian. Other topics are welcome as well, such as deep ecology, power and subjugation, the concept of democracy and America, ethics and philosophy, and gender studies.

San Jose State University Event and Salinas/Monterey Steinbeck Festival Scheduled Back to Back: Do Both!

The San Jose, California conference has been scheduled to precede the 2016 Steinbeck Festival in Salinas and Monterey sponsored by the National Steinbeck Center, located less than two hours south by car from San Jose State University’s downtown campus. Many attendees of the 2013 John Steinbeck conference at San Jose State University traveled to Salinas after the conclusion of the academic proceedings to participate in the tours and other activities organized by the National Steinbeck Center, host of the annual weekend-long celebration of one of the most internationally popular American authors of the 20th century.

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Pictures at an Exhibition: Event in Steinbeck Country Marries Nature Photography And Music by Mussorgsky

August 4, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Image of High Sierra photograph by Charles Cramer

If you love Ansel Adams, John Steinbeck, and majestic music, mark your calendar for August 16, when Charles Cramer will perform and exhibit at a free event in Steinbeck Country. Like Adams, the visual poet of Yosemite’s High Sierra who was born in California in 1902 one week before Steinbeck, Cramer is a classically trained pianist who is equally masterful at music and nature photography. Each art form also attracted Steinbeck, a childhood piano student and Episcopal church choirboy who wrote the text for two books of photography, A Russian Journal and America and Americans. The marriage of sound and image being presented by Cramer on August 16 would hold particular appeal for Steinbeck, a lover of Russian music, California landscape, and the art of photography. A piano performance graduate of San Jose State University and the Eastman School of Music, Cramer played for Ansel Adams as a young photography student 30 years ago. Today he teaches photography, publishes his work in books and magazines, and exhibits at multiple venues, including the Ansel Adams Gallery.

Image of Charles Cramer, musician and master of nature photography

The August 16 event will begin at 3:00 p.m. with Cramer performing music including Modest Mussorgsky’s piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition on the concert grand at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Santa Clara, a San Jose-area city located midway between Ansel Adams’s hometown of San Francisco and John Steinbeck’s Salinas. The musical program will be followed by a reception and exhibition of Cramer’s distinctive nature photography, including dramatic images (like the one above) of Yosemite’s High Sierra. The title of Mussorgsky’s 1874 masterpiece—and Cramer’s August 16 performance and photography show—couldn’t be more appropriate. Mussorgsky composed Pictures at an Exhibition for piano in memory of the painter Viktor Hartmann. Maurice Ravel’s colorful orchestration, completed in 1922, magnified the visual power of Mussorgsky’s music and would have been familiar to Steinbeck, who collected records and listened to Symphony of Psalms, by Mussorgsky’s fellow-Russian Igor Stravinsky, while writing The Grapes of Wrath. “The Great Gate at Kiev,” the theme music for SteinbeckNow.com videos, can be heard in this audio sample of Charles Cramer’s recording of the complete Pictures at an Exhibition. (Pictures at an Exhibition is also the title of an award-winning novel by Sara Houghteling, a former Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University.) Attend the August 16 event at St. Mark’s if you can. John Steinbeck, who grew up singing in an Episcopal church, will be with you in spirit. Click to play:

Photo of Charles  Cramer by G. Dan Mitchell.

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Interview: Marietta, Ohio Visual Artists Appreciate John Steinbeck in Show

June 17, 2015 by 1 Comment

Image of visual artists Michelle Waters, Todd Morrow, Lisa Haney-Bammerlin, and Geoff Schenkel

REsolve Studios, a visual-artist group in Marietta, Ohio, is designed with both visual artist and local community values in mind. Its distinctive connection to literary artists, including John Steinbeck, involves sharing shows that travel to other venues in the Southern Ohio-West Virginia area. The Appalachian Soul, a show that featured a distinctive installation called “The Victorian Brain,” is one example of exhibitions that make local and literary references of special significance to lovers of John Steinbeck, interactive art, and the Appalachian heritage. Ideas and images from The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men informed the exhibition’s eclectic visual elements, reminding viewers that John Steinbeck’s circle of friends at the time he wrote these books embraced visual artists, musicians, and other writers. In the following text by a Chillicothe, Ohio poet-editor and SteinbeckNow.com contributor, visual-artist interviews and individual artist statements suggest how John Steinbeck’s social vision applies to a region suffering marginalization, deprivation, and conflict similar to the cultures of the Dust Bowl, California, and Mexico depicted by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Forgotten Village, and The Pearl. The writer remained painfully aware that genocide was the price of expansion under the invading Spanish, and the rapacious Yankees who followed. The earliest settlers of John Steinbeck’s California were the Ohlone Indians. Chillicothe, Ohio, the home of ancient Indian cultures predating the Ice Age, was later settled by the Shawnee people for whom the city is named. To the east of Chillocothe, the historic town of Marietta, Ohio sits on the West Virginia border. A station along the Underground Railroad before the Civil War, it is the site of the Marietta Earthworks, a burial venue of the pre-European Hopewell Indian culture referred to in the introduction to Kathleen Burgess’s interview with the visual-artist group eager to talk about their sense of mission and heritage, and their appreciation of John Steinbeck.—Ed.

Driving through the Marietta, Ohio neighborhood occupied by the REsolve Studios visual artist collective, I found one of Geoff Schenkel’s murals transforming the wall of an old brick building. On one side of the two-story studio, a garden blooms on land the artists reclaimed from an abandoned gas station. I first met core members—Geoff, Michelle Waters, Lisa Haney-Bammerlin, and Todd Morrow—in 2014 when they were installing The Appalachian Soul at PVG Artisans, a gallery in Chillicothe, Ohio, where I live. Gallery owner Cynthia Davis saw, in REsolve Studios’ blend of energy and social purpose, artists on a spiritual quest to redefine being an artist in Appalachia. They reimagined and reconstructed the exhibit for her gallery. Geoff and Michelle wrote the artists’ statement for the show:

It is a massive, yet intimately approachable, room-sized sculptural environment. Anchoring this innovative combination of literary, musical, and uniquely mixed visual sources, this exhibit draws viewers to its wildly sprawling interactive core and continues to reward its “participants” when they pull back . . . to catch their breath while taking in the surrounding, focused satellite works. This deeply engaging, richly cohesive yet hard-to-define body of work represents the adventurous, even noble inclinations of REsolve artists to reach for a better life by letting go of the comforts, conventions, and security of their known world and seeking new depths in a wilderness of worlds yet to be defined.

Geoff and Michelle stayed in Chillicothe for days assessing the community’s character and needs. Several of the artists presented workshops, spending hours commuting from their homes in the river cities of Marietta, Ohio and Parkersburg, West Virginia. They also attended literary, art, and music activities at the gallery and were embraced by the Chillicothe, Ohio arts community.

Image of Chillicothe, Ohio art installation "The Victorian Brain"

“The Victorian Brain” occupied the center of the gallery, an eight-foot-high block of cabinetry with shelves, drawers, and cubbyholes exposed on all four sides. Its small doors, audio features, moving parts, books and notebooks, and written messages invited interaction. Sturdy beams connected “The Brain,” as it is affectionately known, to other sections, creating a 10’ x 17’ foot space large enough for several visitors to enter and move through at the same time. An outer layer of photographs and sculptures on walls, shelves, and pedestals surrounded the central structure. Some participants sought to contribute and added small objects to the installation. Others moved elements to different places as they passed through. Children contributed notes taped to shiny stones. A beekeeper added an antique bee smoker.

The theme of Appalachians coping with economic, societal, and environmental pressures, limited opportunity, and traditional values fits the city of Chillicothe, Ohio, the first and third capital in the history of the state. White settlers arrived in the 1700s when President Thomas Jefferson granted land to members of the victorious Continental Army following the Revolutionary War. People of the region are proud of this heritage, yet are sometimes seen by outsiders as unlettered and incompetent, as expendable as the Indians driven from Ohio 200 years ago. Authors Allan W. Eckert, Ron Rash, Donald Ray Pollock, Roy Bentley, and Diane Gilliam, among others, have written about Appalachian culture from this perspective. Despite challenges, however, Chillicothe, Ohio continues to plan for the future with optimism, and the area is under consideration for designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of the stunning Hopewell earthworks being rediscovered and authenticated by archaeologists using lidar technology.

Image of visual artist Anthony Wilson

Visual Artist Interview: John Steinbeck in Appalachia

Kathleen Burgess: Welcome to the Steinbeck Now community. Please tell us about yourselves and how literature, and John Steinbeck in particular, figures in the life and work of REsolve Studios.

Geoff Schenkel: We come from humble beginnings. We have challenges. We struggle. We feel uncertainty. When we are together, I feel at times like George and Lennie from Of Mice and Men, almost as if they are different parts at work in my mind, dreaming of something better than when we are on our own. Fellowship is great, belonging is great, but it feels fuller and richer when it is infused with purpose. Of Mice and Men normally travels with the exhibit, and it reflects some of our work as a team of artists.

At PVG Artisans we organized groupings of art into seven interrelated clusters. Each part drew inspiration from a written work. Books are featured because of a question posed by Kentucky-born Gurney Norman (Kinfolks) many years ago at an Appalachian conference that addressed issues of marginalization and stereotypes. He asked, “What would essential reading for the Appalachian region include?” Answering Norman’s question guided the creation of “The Brain.”  Michelle and I, as content curators, selected seven works from a list that is now quite long. Around this core we organized The Appalachian Soul. Our raw library responds to Norman’s question with answers derived from many cultures, including John Steinbeck’s California-based work. For me, REsolve’s work expresses, from the margins of mainstream society, a perspective shared in Steinbeck’s writing.

KB: What is REsolve Studios? How does the name describe what you do, who you are together?

Anthony Wilson: The REsolve name is about solving things by thinking through solutions from all possible angles via collaboration. It’s about working together and building a better community, reconciling our own pitfalls, and making ourselves better people. We improve ourselves, and, thereby, our immediate environment, which extends to the overall community.

Lisa Haney-Bammerlin: For me it means family, a sense of belonging. It means giving a new sense of purpose to discarded things. It’s the will to keep going no matter what is thrown our way. Much like the discarded items, we all were once needed but have to adapt to challenges. Having friends, brothers and sisters, makes the journey less daunting.

Todd Morrow: REsolve = the determination to bring about a solution.

GS: After several years as a community muralist, I began doing studio-based work and toyed with the idea of calling the studio “Junk Man Designs” to play off the found objects I was beginning to use in my work. REsolve worked because it has to do with committing and then living with a decision. We seem like a practical lot of dreamers who lean toward healing the broken, fixing up the discarded, loving the imperfect, and finding a home for the outcasts.

I decided to seek others of similar mindset. If I couldn’t find them in neighborhoods, towns, physical communities, maybe I could find them in communities of shared interest, similar mindset, values, wishes. Todd chose to join. Others passed through. Then Anthony found us. He said he hadn’t become the artist he wanted to be yet and wanted to discover what he was capable of in this community. We attempted big projects, leaps of faith. Michelle liked the work she saw coming from the studio and reached out to us. She said we’d have a hard time getting rid of her. I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to deal with her overwhelming cheerfulness, but it didn’t turn out that way. Lisa found in us kindred spirits. Here we are, a family of choice with all our imperfections.

KB: Tell us something about John Steinbeck that engaged you in planning and creating The Appalachian Soul.

GS: (Quoting Tom Joad’s description of Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath): But now I been thinkin’ what he said, an’ I can remember—all of it. Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an’ he foun’ he didn’t have no soul that was his’n. Says he foun’ he jus’ got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain’t no good, ’cause his little piece of a soul wasn’t no good ‘less it was with the rest, an’ was whole. Funny how I remember. Didn’ think I was even listenin’. But I know now a fella ain’t no good alone.

I believe what Tom Joad says. In that place I’d called alone is the breeding ground for violence and the hurt we unleash actively and passively against ourselves and others.

KB: How do you engage the neighborhood through your art and your garden?

GS: Through our art we seek to create a place where it’s safer to imagine what is possible, safer to explore differences in ways that are open, not competitive, trying to find resolutions to chronic problems, and ways to accept human imperfection. Some might call our work “mentorship.” We work with schools, community groups, and religious individuals, while thinking with others about issues of sustainability, community, inclusiveness, and fairness. Something I’ve always valued about this work is its ability to surprise. Many come to it in joyful, childlike response.

While I love that and want that to be part of the experience, I also love that below the surface there is more going on related to Appalachians coping with outsiders’ attitudes and challenges. Recently I got the great opportunity to watch a young man explore “The Brain.” He’s at that stage of life where he’s getting a sense of himself in the world at large. There is for him a dawning awareness of just how big the world and its issues and its forces can be.

As he explored, sort of posturing as he went, not wanting to be too interested, trying to maintain his cool, on-top-of-the-world football star swagger, he unrolled one of the hidden messages like a fortune from a cookie, and he read these words from a 1912 New York Times editorial titled “Education or Extermination”: The majority of mountain people are unprincipled ruffians. There are two remedies only: education or extermination. The mountaineer, like the red Indian, must learn this lesson. As he read, his jaw dropped and he impulsively showed everyone around him. That back and forth between magical, playful elements and jaw-dropping, serious understanding is our aim.

We seek to make the studio and gardens spiritually and physically a healthy, nourishing place by amending once neglected soil through intensive composting and sharing with others the abundance of what grows here: art, food, and human relationships through mutual exchange.

Michelle Waters: I think the moments that struck me the most were when I was working in the garden, people I didn’t know would drive by and smile, honk, wave, as if they supported the act, the momentum of what we were doing. That felt really special to me. I also really enjoy the concrete blocks that have become a part of the garden’s retaining walls—the blocks that we made with the local boys and girls club, creating art together that they could see when they walked through the neighborhood, and be proud because they helped make their part of the planet more beautiful.

KB: How have you grown within the collective and in interactions with communities you’ve served?

GS: Fighting the bitterness that stems from living in proximity to what some call a “sacrifice zone” isn’t as hard as it once was, and the desire to punish others for their inhumanity doesn’t burn as strongly. Doling out punishment isn’t my job, and with that burden removed I can grow into being a healthier participant in this creation we share. I’ve witnessed suicidal individuals become more forgiving of themselves and seen people at wit’s end come here to ground themselves, seeking comfort and a chance to deal with the trauma that comes from life.

KB: How do you make decisions—regular, structured meetings, or another way?

GS: We have had regular meetings. We are currently working on our own projects, but we come together every so often to reconnect. We discuss things as if we were a family sitting around the kitchen table weighing facts, opinions, options, then sorting the tasks that need to be completed to reach our group goals. It is not a clean, efficient business model. It doesn’t run itself, but this method has produced some wondrous results. I think we go by instinct, or hunches. Michelle wanted to create the exhibit at PVG Artisans. Anthony and Todd wanted to do the steampunk show in Athens [Ohio]. Those turned out well on many levels. We constantly adapt to challenges.

KB: No other studio captures the spirit of this region, its traditions, realities, and potential, better than REsolve Studios. I know that your art offers chances for exploration and delight, with serious educational implications. Thanks for sharing your thoughts about John Steinbeck, community, and art at SteinbeckNow.com.

Photo of Michelle Waters, Todd Morrow, Lisa Haney-Bammerlin, and Geoff Schenkel by Cynthia Davis.

Photo of “The Victorian Brain” courtesy REsolve Studios.

Photo of Anthony Wilson courtesy Michele Coleman.

Filed Under: Places & Events, Steinbeck's America Tagged With:

Steinbeck Star Rises to the Occasion: Susan Shillinglaw Named Interim Director of National Steinbeck Center

June 9, 2015 by 4 Comments

Image of John Steinbeck star Susan Shillinglaw

Susan Shillinglaw has a PhD from UNC-Chapel Hill, a bibliography as long as your arm, and star status as an internationally celebrated professor of English at San Jose State University, where she teaches a course devoted to John Steinbeck and formerly served as director of San Jose State University’s Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. No disrespect intended, but years after earning her UNC-Chapel Hill degree she looks more like a graduate student than a “senior scholar,” living proof that people who love their work really do keep their youth.

No disrespect intended, but years after earning her UNC-Chapel Hill degree Susan looks more like a graduate student than a ‘senior scholar.’

Watching Susan in action, you wonder when she sleeps—organizing conferences, writing books, editing reissues of John Steinbeck works famous for the fluent style of her helpful introductions. She lives with her husband, a marine biologist, in laid-back Pacific Grove, John Steinbeck’s former home, but clocks more frequent-flyer miles on Steinbeck business than some CEOs. Her management portfolio now includes the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California, where she was named interim director following Colleen Bailey’s appointment as managing director of the Monterey Jazz Festival.

She lives with her husband in laid-back Pacific Grove, but clocks more frequent-flyer miles on Steinbeck business than some CEOs.

From its inception, Susan has served as an organizer, board member, and resident expert for the Salinas center, which has struggled against local odds to live up to its national name. The Monterey County Weekly reported last week on the slow pace of the lease-back deal to relieve finances by selling the center’s downtown Salinas building to San Jose State University’s sister school, California State Monterey Bay, saying of Susan that “she doesn’t like the term ‘limbo.’ It implies inactivity, and she say’s that’s not what’s happening.”

Susan has served as an organizer, board member, and resident expert for the Salinas center, which has struggled against local odds to live up to its national name.

According to the newspaper, Susan wants to increase active collaboration between the Steinbeck center at San Jose State University where she teaches and the one in Salinas, California, a distinction she understands can be confusing to outsiders, despite the physical and cultural distance between the two venues: “She wants to join the forces of the San Jose State and Salinas Steinbeck Centers next year in a synergistic partnership to share programming, attendance and advertising.”

‘She wants to join the forces of the San Jose State and Salinas Steinbeck Centers next year in a synergistic partnership to share programming, attendance and advertising.’

Speaking as a friend of Susan’s and a fellow PhD-graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, I can’t imagine anyone better prepared by education, experience, or energy to bridge existing gaps and make John Steinbeck, her life’s work, more accessible to the public.

Filed Under: Places & Events, Steinbeck's California Tagged With:

Love John Steinbeck and Care about International Affairs? Subscribe Today to Steinbeck Review

June 9, 2015 by 2 Comments

Cover image of spring 2015 issue of John Steinbeck Review

John Steinbeck ideas and events are international affairs. Need proof? The current issue of Steinbeck Review, a scholarly journal published in the spring and fall for San Jose State University by Penn State Press, demonstrates Steinbeck’s global relevance in an array of articles, book reviews, and announcements of interest to Steinbeck lovers everywhere. Four academic experts—Susan Shillinglaw, Melinda Pham, TK Martin, and Pete Barraza—discuss the topic “Teaching and Living Steinbeck’s Stories” based on decades of classroom experience. Mimi Gladstein, a professor in Texas, focuses on “Immigration Issues: Steinbeck’s Continued Relevance.” Other contributors connect Steinbeck’s writing to issues of ecology, economy, and technology, international affairs of equal importance today. A helpful list of books and papers about John Steinbeck published in 2012-13 further confirms Steinbeck’s continuing appeal, despite declining readership for other authors of his generation. So does a pair of book reviews—one about discovering post-Steinbeck America on the road (with your dog), another about the ongoing controversy over Steinbeck’s alleged involvement with the CIA. The announcement that San Jose State University will host a conference on John Steinbeck’s internationalism in May of 2016, the first such event since 2013, is particularly welcome news for readers of Steinbeck Review outside the United States. Love John Steinbeck’s fiction and follow international affairs? Do yourself a favor. Subscribe today.

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