05/25/08

MY BIG MOMENT!

My new book, O THE CLEAR MOMENT, will be published in October 2008 by Counterpoint Press of Berkeley, CA.  The book is a collection of nine pieces of autobiographical writing, most of them previously unpublished or obscurely published; taken together, they incorporate a submerged or buried chronology, and add up to what I like to call an "implied autobiography."  The book sports this nifty cover by Ralph Steadman:

From the forthcoming Fall 2008 Counterpoint Press catalog:

A SOUTHERN CHRONICLER DELIVERS A MESMERIZING MEMOIR, A COCKTAIL OF INNOCENT NOSTALGIA AND IRREVERENT HUMOR

If “memoirabilia” were a word, it would perfectly describe O THE CLEAR MOMENT. In this enormously appealing “implied autobiography,” Ed McClanahan has assembled a gathering of what he calls “coming-of- age to coming-of-old-age” stories that are both quirky and cutting, hilarious and lyrical, all told in the inimitable voice of one of his generation’s best Southern chroniclers of American life. McClanahan launches his tale in 1950, the year he turned seventeen and had his “Personal Best Great Moment”—one that involved Lucky Strikes, a Tony Curtis forelock, a pretty girl named Bernice, a pair of Kentucky high school basketball hot-shots named Bobby One and Bobby Two, and several raw eggs. From there, McClanahan is off and running, describing characters from his eventful life with affectionate and precise detail. There’s the summer he spends on a road crew in Yosemite National Park, striving (with ever-decreasing degrees of success) to be faithful to his college sweetheart back home. There’s the 1969 “peace” demonstration at Stanford University that was less a revolution than a traffic jam. There’s the McClanavan, the ’68 VW Microbus that took McClanahan and his new bride on a 14,000-mile trek in search of honkytonks, and the “old white whale” of a ’65 Chevy van named Moldy Dick that helped to bring them home again. And then there’s “Dog Loves Ellie,” a tender, provocative meditation on forty years of unrequited schooldays love. Like “escapees from the cover of the Saturday Evening Post,” McClanahan and his stories come alive as American souvenirs, enchanting readers with the signature prose the Cleveland Plain Dealer says has a “bittersweet, almost wistful current trickling just beneath the surface . . . adding texture, continuity, and poignancy to his reminiscences without diminishing their gently humorous gifts.”

Here's the Table of Contents:

GREAT MOMENTS IN SPORTS
HEY SHOOBIE!
FONDELLE, or:  THE WHORE WITH A HEART OF GOLD
ANOTHER GREAT MOMENT IN SPORTS
A FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE
AND THEN I WROTE...
DOG LOVES ELLIE
HOW’S THAT AGAIN?
THE IMP OF WRITING:  ARS POETICA

I’d been thinking about someday assembling these marginally autobiographical pieces (and a few others which didn’t make the final cut) for quite a while, when, a few years ago, the novel I was then working on, THE RETURN OF THE SON OF NEEDMORE, unexpectedly seized up on me, and stalled out.  “Casting about for something to occupy the vasty fastnesses of my mind” (to quote myself from the story titled “And Then I Wrote …”), I figured I’d temporarily set aside the novel while I worked on a short piece—“Dog Loves Ellie”—about a 40th-class- reunion encounter with a high school flame, a story that had long been simmering on the back-burner of (to mix my metaphors indissolubly) the fastnesses of my mind. That little piece, I supposed, would be maybe ten pages long, and might take a month or six weeks to write, and would finish off what I also supposed might someday become a posthumous book, a modest little afterthought that would probably languish in a drawer somewhere till I was long gone.

But “Dog Loves Ellie” turned out to be almost three years in the writing, and 60 pages long, and is to my mind the capstone of this book ... and when it was finished, lo, I was still here!  Meanwhile, although I had begun this “interim” project by thinking I would just be slapping together a few amusing stories, in no particular order, before I went back to my novel, as I worked on “Dog Loves Ellie”—and as it grew longer and longer—, the autobiographical imperative began asserting its self-important self, and I slowly came to realize that there was a sort of submerged chronology in these stories, which would be revealed and enhanced if I could just bring myself to leave out a few things that had once seemed indispensable, and to rearrange the rest accordingly.  I did, and O THE CLEAR MOMENT is the result.

Also forthcoming in October is a CD of my reading of the story "Fondelle, or: The Whore with a Heart of Gold." The CD is produced by my friend Jack Wright, a sound engineer, musician, and member of the faculty of the Film Department of  Ohio University.  It will be packaged with the four splendid wood engravings by Wesley Bates that illuminated the Larkspur Press edition of the story.

I'm planning a little western bookboogie when OTCM comes out. As of now (5/25/08), I'm scheduled to materialize in certain select venues, as follows:

10/14 (evening) — reading at Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City
10/15-17 — I'll be at Utah State University in Logan, where I'll do readings, visit classes, etc.
10/22 (evening) — reading at Stanford
10/23 (evening) — reading at Claremont McKenna College in San Diego
11/1 (evening) — reading at Tsunami Bookstore, Eugene, OR
11/4 (evening) — reading at the University of Oregon in Eugene
11/15 — Kentucky Book Fair, Frankfort, KY
12/13 — Maysville (KY) Book Fair

Other impending mcclanamanifestations TBA in the fullness of time.

Un-retouched photo by Clay Gaunce of Ed McClanahan reading from "Famous People I Have Known" at a benefit show for Metropolitan Blues All*Stars bassist, Ricky Baldwin, at The Dame in Lexington, August 4, 2005.

I've been working sporadically for the last several years on a novel which I usually describe as "a sort of left-handed, latter-day sequel" to THE NATURAL MAN, titled THE RETURN OF THE SON OF NEEDMORE, in which Harry Eastep, the point-of-view character in NATURAL MAN, returns to his hometown after a career in academia on the West Coast, and finds himself on the jury in a murder trial. Readers who remember NATURAL MAN may be interested to know that much of SON OF NEEDMORE is in the form of flashbacks, in one of which the late Monk McHorning makes a cameo appearance, and that Oodles Ockerman, who has survived the intervening years, also looms large (so to speak) in the foreground of the story. Sample chapters from the book — "Harry at the Breach," "Freejack," and "Poodad" — are posted on the "Writings" page of this website.