As many of you know, Beth is a voracious reader. Or, to be technically accurate, a voracious listener. Between the Library of Congress’ fantastic free audio book service and the commercial offerings of publishers and services like Audible.com, she’s always got several books on her cool little listening device—it’s called Victor Reader Stream. Bad name, great product.

I’m a voracious but impatient reader. I consume magazine style pieces, newspapers of all stripes, but I infrequently invest in whole books. I’m not proud of that. It just is.

But because of Beth, I get to sample both fiction and non-fiction books, because she listens when we go to bed. If it’s something that I don’t want to hear, she puts her little device under her pillow, but otherwise, she puts it between us and I listen with her. And, because she usually falls asleep before I do, I end up hearing  more each night than she does. The penalty is that I then hear stuff again—she rewinds to the last part she heard before she snoozed away.

The current work we’re listening to is The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America.

It’s a great read/listen. For those of you who’ve read The Warmth of Other Sons, you’ll be very interested in the enormous role a weekly newspaper on the South Side of Chicago played in the Great Migration.

And if you want a taste of it, check out this excerpt in The Atlantic.

I love living in Chicago, warts and all. And one of the reasons is that, in large part owed to Beth and her memoir-writing classes, living here has taught me the huge role black people have played in the city’s and the nation’s history. I, like a lot of people, I think, had a Cliff’s Notes understanding of the struggles and triumphs black people have faced that are traceable to our awful history of slavery.

The full, real stories are so much richer, so much more awful, and so much more triumphant than my abridged version was. And more enlightening.

Here in my Printers Row neighborhood, we have construction cranes all around building shiny new towers, and a few miles away, children getting killed by stray bullets. It’s hard to reconcile that and understand and figure out how to change things.

We’ve got to get past simplistic ideas like bootstraps and vouchers on one hand, and vilification and labeling on the other. And, as a practical matter, I don’t think we can understand how to do better until we face, understand, and reconcile the past.

P.S. The Defender is alive and well.

I subscribe to something called The Writer’s Almanac and wake up every morning to a poem and an email message listing things that went on in the literary world that day in history. Today’s listing includes something about writer and publisher Dave Eggers that I thought worth sharing here.

This book launched an empire, of sorts.

I could still see when I was a student at University of Illinois, and I worked at the Daily Illini, our college newspaper. Dave Eggers worked at the Daily Illini, too, and it’s his birthday today. “When he was in college at the University of Illinois, both his parents died of cancer within six months, and he was completely on his own at the age of 21,” the Writer’s Almanac reports. “He was also made the guardian of his eight-year-old brother, Christopher, so he had to drop out of college to support the family, and wrote about it in his best-selling memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.”

Eggers went on to launch his own publishing company and start a tutoring center and writing school. He’s written and edited dozens of books and screenplays, too, but what really struck me about his mention in today’s almanac was something he said about those life-altering events during his college years. I didn’t have anything nearly as catastrophic happen to me when I was 21, but the life-altering events that occurred a few years later help me understand his reaction to it all. I’ll end here with that quote — see what you think:

He later said: “On the one hand you are so completely bewildered that something so surreal and incomprehensible could happen. At the same time, suddenly the limitations or hesitations that you might have imposed on yourself fall away. There’s a weird, optimistic recklessness that could easily be construed as nihilism but is really the opposite. You see that there is a beginning and an end and that you have only a certain amount of time to act. And you want to get started.”

Thank you, Dave Eggers. Happy birthday.

This coming June, I will celebrate a significant birthday. As in a big round number. To be honest, they’re all sort of blending together at this point, and none seem that significant.

A photo from “The Village Across the Sea,” a book of Brian’s terrific photos of Ama, traditional Asian divers.

But I’m not letting this one go by without using it as an excuse to splurge on myself. And so, to celebrate my birthday this year, I’ll be flying to Tokyo.

I’ll be staying with our nephew Brian, who’s fashioned a career teaching English while also building a marvelous professional photography portfolio. Beth’s posted about him at the blog before—he specializes in shooting two very different types of subjects: Japanese heavy metal and punk concerts, and Haenyeo—traditional female divers of Asia.

Brian also shoots metal concerts.

Brian just got a brand spanking new job, and he’ll be living very near to Tokyo by the time I visit.

He’s making plans for us to take in some Nippon Professional Baseball games. I’m told these games are an absolute hoot and it’ll be a chance for he and I, at last, to root for the same team (he’s a Cub fan, I’m a White Sox fan). With any luck, we’ll get to see Shohei Otani, a phenomenal player who pitches when he’s not playing outfield or serving as designated hitter.

Brian will also give me a guided tour of, well, whatever he thinks we should do. He’s been in Japan for several years now, and I’m trusting his judgment on what I should not miss.

I’m also going to trust his judgment on what foods I absolutely must eat, as well what beers and sakes I absolutely must drink.

Plans are being made as we speak and suggestions from blog readers are welcome. Meantime, I’ve got to do a little research on the Japanese baseball scene. Sayonara until next Monday.

I met today’s guest blogger Jeff Flodin when he and his Seeing Eye dog joined our downtown memoir writing class for a few sessions in 2009. Writing has been Jeff’s primary vocation ever since: He is working on a short story collection about vision loss, and a version of this guest post originally appeared on his Jalapeños in the Oatmeal blog.

Jeff Flodin with his Seeing Eye dog.

by Jeff Floddin

My wife and I were high school sweethearts—for half of sophomore year, that is. We attended colleges 427 miles apart. She returned home for high school reunions, I didn’t. We neither saw nor spoke for thirty-two years.

During our decades apart, she had her first bout with breast cancer; I lost the ability to see faces.

When we reconnected, we shared lots of stories and, in the telling, she sounded the same as I remembered. Then and now, when I hear her voice, I see the face of a sixteen year-old girl.

My last trip to the picture show when I could see the picture was The Untouchables. That was around 1989, when the blind spots in my visual field meant I had to look from one face to another to follow the conversation. I saw that Sean Connery was balding. I had noticed that I too was balding. I saw how virile a balding Sean Connery was. I thought the same applied to me. But my algebraic truth that if a=b and b=c, then a=c sadly didn’t apply when a = Sean Connery and c = me. At least, that’s what my friends told me, and, bless them, they broke the news in a Disney way.

At our wedding seven years ago, the friend who introduced us read from my wife’s sophomore yearbook “Hey,” I had written, “it was fun being your boyfriend for four and a half months (132 days). Maybe we should try it again sometime—like in 25 or 30 years.”

Everybody oohed and aahed.

I smiled serenely, like a prophet. I scanned every face, every dear face that had not changed in forty years. And I saw and heard kindness and caring, joy and love. And I became aware of what beauty truly means and where it dwells.

And then I kissed my beautiful bride.

Jeff Flodin and his Seeing Eye dog Randy will make a cameo appearance in my upcoming book. You can get a sneak peek of a short chapter from Writing Out Loud online now, free of charge. Just complete the form here.

Some of you have heard my good news already, but worth repeating: Golden Alley Press, an independent publisher outside of Philadelphia, is publishing my new book!

Writing Out Loud is due out next month, and I’ve been meeting with Nancy Sayre, my Golden Alley Press editor over the phone every week since we signed the contract last year. In addition to helping me with revisions and rewrites, the good folks at Golden Alley Press have been hard at work
revamping all things re: my online image.

Mike’s already posted about the new site and blog design. The book is next, and here’s an excerpt from the publisher’s description–it’s straight from the Books by Beth Finke page:

Writing Out Loud: What a Blind Teacher Learned from Leading a Memoir Class for Seniors is the touching story of Beth’s experience teaching older adults how to capture their stories on paper – and deliver them aloud to their classmates.

In this memoir that reads like a novel, you will come to love the men and women whose poignant memories intertwine with Beth’s. Through telling their stories, the members of her classes come to know each other and connect more deeply with their own families. The experience is rich with life lessons for both students and teacher.

The revisions and rewrites aren’t done yet, but Nancy’s counsel over the phone has been indispensable. She makes me feel like we’ve been friends for years, and it’s astonishing how comfortable she is with my blindness: together we’ve puzzled through ways to include me in decisions on everything from cover design to branding. During last week’s meeting we thought hard about how many photographs to include in Writing Out Loud.

I was flattered when Nancy credited the “clear imagery” my writing creates. She wondered out loud whether it might be better to use very few photographs and let readers imagine what everything in Writing Out Loud looks like.

I heartily concurred with that thought. “That’ll help the readers get right into my head, they’ll have to imagine things the same way I do.”

Nancy continues to help me shape my writing for the better, and you can get a sneak peek of a short chapter online now: Just complete the form here.

And stay tuned, there’s more to come.