TCR Great Essays (#1): "Nature Walk" by Stephen Dau

Stephen Dau

The Committee Room inaugurates its TCR Great Essays series, which highlights outstanding works of non-fiction recently published online, with "Nature Walk" by Stephen Dau.

"Nature Walk" was published in Ploughshares (Spring 2014).

Dau, who worked in post-war reconstruction in the Balkans, recalls with masterful detail and a wry sense of humor the absurdities and dangers of everyday life in Sarajevo in the aftermath of war.

"'Nature Walk' is an excerpt from a longer work based around a period of time I spent in Bosnia in the 1990s," Dau explained to The Committee Room. "The excerpt consists of several early sections which have been reworked to make one stand-alone essay. In the book, however, these sections act a little differently, more as scene setting pieces than as a self-contained, free standing story. It comes directly from my experience, and as much as anything it is an effort to make sense of what I was doing there, and by extension what America and the West were doing there after the fall of communism and the Yugoslav wars, and by further extension what America and the West tend to do in lots of places around the world."

Bestsellers List Revisited: 1974 (Fiction) -- An Interview with Jay Parini About "Burr" by Gore Vidal

"In a novel like Burr I’m not composing a polemic about the founding fathers. Rather, I am describing the way men who want power respond to one another, to themselves," Gore Vidal told The Paris Review.

In the spring of 1974, as the Watergate scandal that would bring down the presidency of Richard Nixon was playing out in the halls of Congress and across the news media, Vidal's Burr, a look at the American Revolution and Early Republic through the eyes of its darkest figure, Aaron Burr, was at the top of the New York Times fiction bestsellers list.

"How diabolically well-timed is the appearance of Gore Vidal's latest novel, Burr; just at this most disillusioning moment in American history when all the old verities are beginning to seem hollow, Mr. Vidal gives us an interpretation of our early history that says in effect that all the old verities were never much to begin with. And what a tour de force is the result!...What an employment for the usable past! What hagiography for the Nixon era!" wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times.

TCR Story of the Month for May: "At the Gravesite" by Martin Lindauer

Author Martin Lindauer

The Committee Room Story of the Month for May is the "At the Gravesite" by Martin Lindauer. In this deftly written short-short story, a seventy-year old man finally pays his first visit to his long-dead father's grave. Lindauer takes a light approach to heavy questions about fathers and sons, cultural identity and classic American upward mobility.

Martin Lindauer has published short fiction, essays, and memoirs in Glasschord Magazine, Long Story Short, New Vilna Review, Oracle, and other journals. A retired professor, he has published widely on psychology and the arts, including Aging, Creativity, and Art (2003); Psyche and the Literary Muses (2009); and The Expressiveness of Perceptual Experience: Physiognomy Reconsidered (2013). Lindauer is a native of Brooklyn, New York, and a graduate of the University of Illinois and The New School. He lives just outside San Francisco with his wife Bonnie and dog Archie.

TCR Literary Journals Series: Newfound (An Interview with Newfound's Managing Editor Daniel Levis Keltner)

"The world doesn’t need another literary journal," says Daniel Levis Keltner, managing editor of Newfound. "This was my canned response to friends proposing to start journals. It takes a tremendous amount of work to accomplish the very basics—to publish hip, stirring, and quality work. So many already established journals out there need helping hands—why not pitch in? I’m no more original than anyone else. So, for me, to get into publishing meant the journal had to strive to achieve more."

Newfound is an online publication devoted to literary, visual, and artistic perspectives and interpretations of the physical world. Using fiction, essays, poetry, and visual art Newfound explores how place shapes identity, imagination, and understanding.

Daniel Levis Keltner, managing editor of Newfound.

A recent issue offers "Engagement," a short story by Darrin Doyle, in which a stable, middle-aged couple finds their lives unraveling when -- emboldened by drink and, perhaps more importantly, by the strangeness of being out very late at night -- they finally confront noisy neighbors.

Jaime Groetsema begins her review of a Chicago poetry reading by James Franco and Frank Bidart with a prelude about being interrupted by a fellow passenger while reading As I Lay Dying on a grimy city bus -- "He leaned over. He said what I was reading was his favorite book. His pleasure made me nervous...The man I thought I recognized was getting up. Was whispering in my ear. Was whispering and grinning: 'enjoy the book.' I couldn't read it anymore. The book was no longer mine."

Writing for Television: An Interview with Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, author of "Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted and All the Brilliant Minds Who Made The Mary Tyler Moore Show a Classic"

Some of the best comedy writing in the history of television was done for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. This classic American sitcom about a single woman in her thirties, the fictional Mary Richards, forging a life on her own as a Minneapolis television news producer, places at number six on the Writers Guild of America's list of 101 Best Written TV Series. TV Guide ranks The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which was a Saturday night fixture on CBS from 1970 to 1977, among the ten best TV series of all time.

In the recently published Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: And all the Brilliant Minds Who Made The Mary Tyler Moore Show a Classic Jennifer Keishin Armstrong offers a fascinating and deeply researched account of how The Mary Tyler Moore Show was put together. The show's creators, James L. Brooks and Allan Burns, are at the center of events but Armstrong gives well-deserved attention to MTMS writers, especially Treva Silverman who wrote fifteen of the series' one-hundred sixty-eight episodes. The witty and insightful work of Silverman and other young women writers gave this series about a young woman an authenticity that was essential to its success.  

TCR Story of the Month for April: "History" by Cezarija Abartis

Cezarija Abartis

The Committee Room is happy to offer "History" by Cezarija Abartis as TCR Story of the Month for April. In this brief yet complex story written with honesty and precision, an American woman carries her troubled personal history to an Old World city that assiduously preserves the glories of its past.

Cezarija Abartis’ Nice Girls and Other Stories was published by New Rivers Press. Her stories have appeared in Per Contra, r.kv.r.y., Waccamaw, and New York Tyrant, among others. Her flash, “The Writer,” was selected by Dan Chaon for Wigleaf’s Top 50 online Fictions of 2012. Recently she completed a novel, a thriller. She teaches at St. Cloud State University.

Bestsellers List Revisited -- 1974: Harry S. Truman Resurgent with "Plain Speaking" by Merle Miller

The Committee Room looks back forty years to the spring of 1974 when Plain Speaking: an Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman by Merle Miller topped the New York Times Non-Fiction bestseller list. Miller's book presents Truman as a straight talking, salty-tongued Midwestern sage. This was a fresh take on a former president who up to this time had been generally dismissed by scholars and the public as a hack politician out of his depth as leader of the free world.

The success of Plain Speaking led to a major reevaluation of Truman and his presidency.

Miller's "oral biography," published by the Berkley Publishing Corporation, is based on lengthy taped interviews that Miller conducted with Truman in 1961 and 1962, a dozen years before the book's release. At the time of the interviews, Truman was in his late seventies, living in retirement in his hometown of Independence, Missouri, and mostly ignored by the political establishment. Miller, a jack-of-all-trades Manhattan-based writer whose work included screenplays, television scripts, novels, and journalism, was hired to interview Truman for a proposed series of television programs on the former president and his administration. The proposed series was never made due to a lack of interest from television networks and Miller simply held on to the tapes.