Can’t top this for a Memorial Day preview

Sunday I will be participating in the new Artsfest in Old Bowie, MD. Then on Monday, Memorial Day, I’ll be in D.C. on Constitution Avenue near the Vietnam Memorial with the Memorial Day Writers’ Project. I can’t top this link http://www.memorialdaywritersproject.com/ComingEvents.htm for previewing the MDWP event on Monday.  Just got a new order of my Skytroopers CD — will be singing from it and reading from Cologne No. 10 for Men.

Also, I got an email announcing the new eBook anthology from this group – $4.99. I am singing some of the songs.

A Common Bond II

After purchase you can download to your viewing device of choice, then click on audio files to hear the music. Here’s a link that tells more about this eBook and MDWP https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/165160. It has click-through ordering.

0 of 10 available … that’s good!

This morning we accessed the Prince George’s County library website — wanted to locate the opening time of the Hyattsville branch to determine when to swap the old books and check out the new ones. While using the website it seemed a good time to “visit” my novel Well Considered. The information came up that zero of the ten copies in the County library system were available to be checked out — some were reserved and the remainder were checked out until next month. Sounded like there might be a group of people reading it at the same time for … a book discussion? Further research showed that Surratts-Clinton library is having a discussion of Richard Morris’ Well Considered on Wednesday, June 20, 2012 at 7:30 p.m. So zero of ten available turned into a very good day! 

An awesome queue…at the Gaithersburg Book Festival

Jenny Lawson

An awesome queue of over a hundred enthusiastic fans followed Jenny Lawson from her speakers’ tent to the book signing tent. People were still in the signing line more than an hour later at 6:00 P.M. when everyone was packing up. We looked in the program to find out who this Pied Piper was and discovered it was Jenny who was signing her best-selling book Let’s Pretend This Never Happened ( A Mostly True Memoir). I was unable to hear her speak on this balmy, sunny Saturday, May 19, at the Gaithersburg (MD) Book Festival, but I did get to hear some others as I took breaks from signing books in my own booth. I made it a point to hear Richard Peabody with his new book of short stories by Washington area women. I have a story in his earlier collection Stress City: A Big Book of Fiction by 50 DC Area Guys. Another on my “to-hear” list was Julia Duin, a Hyattsville (MD) author friend and newspaper writer and editor, who wrote Days of Fire and Glory: The Rise and Fall of a Charismatic Community, revealing “The details of a scandal that rocked the charismatic and Christian community movements, and the Episcopal Church.”

John Corey Whaley

Well over a hundred authors spoke and offered their books at the fair, including Jim Lehrer (Tensions City: Inside the Presidential Debates, from Kennedy-Nixon to Obama-McCain), Judah Friedlander from NBC’s 30 Rock (How to Beat Up Anybody), Baratunde Thurston (How to Be Black – a New York Times bests-seller), Donna Britt (Brothers (and Me)), Tim Wendel (Summer of ’68: The Season That Changed Baseball),

Julia Duin

Keith Donohue (Centuries of June), John Feinstein (One on One: Behind the Scenes with the Greats in the Game), L.E. Modesitt, Jr. (Princeps),  and Luis Carlos Montalván (Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him).

Michelle Ray – “Falling for Hamlet”

I shared a booth with novelist David Levy (Revolt of the Animals) selling and signing Well Considered and Cologne No. 10 For Men. Levy’s Revolt of the Animals is an entertaining satire about animals taking over the earth to save it from humans who are bound to destroy it.

I had the pleasure of listening to award winning young adult novelists John Corey Whaley (Where Things Come Back), Pam Borchorz (Drought), and Michelle Ray (Falling for Hamlet), as part of my effort to get ideas on writing for young adults. My next novel, which I am now revising, is of that genre.

Pam Bacholz

I picked up some really useful tips, such as:  don’t use adjectives and adverbs.

David and Me

‘Tis the season

Rick, Audrey & Dayana – Sense of Wonder – 2012 Greenbelt, MD

‘Tis the season of festivals all around us. Riverdale Artsfest was wonderful and will definitely be on our list to watch for next year   http://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/a-curiosity-shop/. Procrastination prevented us from having a booth at the Green Man Festival in Greenbelt last weekend but, as a result, we got to enjoy the festival from a spectator perspective. My book cover illustrator, Audrey Engdahl, was there in her other role as musician along with Rick Engdahl and Dayana Yochim, collectively known as Sense of Wonder http://rickandaudrey.com/audrey/.

Saturday will be my third year at the Gaithersburg Book Festival http://gaithersburgbookfestival.org/. Accounts of the previous two festivals may be found at  http://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/end-of-the-world/ and http://richardmorrisauthor.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/delightful/. They put on an amazing festival the first year and it was even better the second time around. Looking forward to the third!

On to Bowie May 27 and June 2 for the first year of Bowie Artsfest http://www.gazette.net/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120502/NEWS/705029541/1025/new-festival-coming-to-old-town-bowie-spotlights-the-arts&&template=PrinterFriendlygaz  and long-time Bowiefest http://www.cityofbowie.org/Government/CommunityServices/SpecialEvents/bowiefest.asp. In between there will be Memorial Day May 28 on the Washington D.C. mall with Memorial Day Writers Project http://www.memorialdaywritersproject.com/. Cologne No. 10 for Men and also my Skytrooopers CD are usually my best sellers on Memorial Day and Veterans Day while Well Considered is more popular in Bowie. People enjoy puzzling the locations in the book in addition to enjoying a thriller with lots of Maryland history in it. Like most fiction, both books contain some fictionalized real events and a lot of veterans recognize in Cologne some of their own experiences from military service in general or Vietnam specifically — they certainly won’t recognize the ending, however, in this war satire! Hope you First Cav people will make a point of finding me.

A Curiosity Shop

Clarke Bedford and Vanadu

If you think you’ve seen it all, you should have been down by the train station at the Riverdale Park, Maryland, ArtsFest2012 on Sunday. It was an excellent place to explore curiosities and treasures.

• Artist Clarke Bedford from Hyattsville, Maryland, a curator at the Smithsonian’s Hirsh Horn Museum displayed Vanadu, his outrageous gothic art car (http://clarkebedford.com/cms/index.php/contact-info/intro/).

One String Willie

• One String Willie (David Williams from Philadelphia) (www.onestringwillie.com) made diddley bows (one-string slide guitars) for kids out of 2x4s, nails and wire and taught the children how to play them

• Staff from the College Park Aviation Museum at the world’s oldest continuously operated airport, College Park, assembled on-site a replica of the Wright Brothers’ biplane wings. www.collegeparkaviationmuseum.com/

Chris Benjamin and Model Trains

• Delvin Fanning, and other University of Maryland soil scientists, displayed a large Russian map showing the types of soils all over that country as well as four-foot-high samples of different types of soil

Young Docents from Riversdale Mansion

• Chris Benjamin from the Riverdale Model Railroad Club displayed Model trains—a perfect complement to the full-scale freight trains that shrieked and roared and rumbled past the festival all day long.

Young Docents from Riversdale Mansion

• Minature docents from nearby Riversdale Mansion, dressed at the Doll House, a nearby antique doll shop, made frequent appearances (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riversdale_Mansion)

• We authors resided in our literary corner, telling people stories; among us were Yi Weng, who displayed a book of imaginative cartoons (www.brushmen.com), some of the six authors who wrote Fourth Sunday, the Journey of a Book Club and call themselves B.W. Read (www.bwread.com), and Ann Ferguson (represented by Audrey Bragg) author of the children’s book, A Fine New Home for Young James Madison. Well Considered caught people’s interest because of its Maryland history and racial issues (and suspense), and a Vietnam vet bought Cologne No. 10 For Men. Several people expressed interest in having me do readings to a group.

Richard Morris

Dozens of artists filled booths in the Town Center, and bands played on the performance stage all day–R&B, Blues, Oldies, Jazz-Pop, and Mexican–emceed by David Burd, news personality at DC’s WTOP-FM (103.5).

Overall, ‘twas a pleasant day in Riverdale Park.

A Space of Their Own

The Steel Barrier on
Windom Road at North Brentwood, MD

On Saturday April 28, I took a bus tour in Prince George’s County, Maryland (just east of Washington, D.C.) sponsored by the Prince George’s African American Museum and Cultural Center (PGAAMCC), of North Brentwood, MD. The tour was entitled “A Space Of Their Own – A Celebration of Prince George’s Historic Black Townships – North Brentwood, Eagle Harbor, Fairmount Heights, Glenarden.”

Miss Lillian Beverly from North Brentwood

Like thousands throughout the country, many suburbs near Washington, DC. were racially segregated until the Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin. Until then, few suburbs existed with ready access to Washington by rail, streetcar or trolley where black residents could buy or build homes and get “a space of their own.”

Nancy Saxon from Fairmont Heights and Yolonda Evans, PGAAMCC Programs Coordinator

Our tour visited three of these black townships. First was North Brentwood. Brentwood was all white—a “sundown suburb,” in the words of James W. Loewen, author of Sundown Towns(towns, suburbs and developments where blacks were not allowed after sundown). Residents of North Brentwood were not allowed to enter Brentwood, especially after dark. Pictured above is the steel guardrail and ditch that separates historically white Brentwood, MD from historically black North Brentwood.

Laurence Winston, Sr. from Glenarden

In 1924 North Brentwood became the first incorporated majority black municipality in the county. The B&O railroad and the Columbia and Maryland Railway provided access to the city. Black residents began building homes in Fairmount Heights, Maryland, in 1903, which was not incorporated until 1935. Glenarden was the fourth incorporated African American municipality in the county.  Both were served by trolley lines to the city. The tour also visited a recreational community for African Americans on the Patuxent River in the southern end of the county called Eagle Harbor, which was incorporated in 1929. Local historians guided us through each town.

On Thursday May 17 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., the PGAAMCC Book Club will discuss Sundown Towns by James W. Loewen. See my blog post “James W. Loewen at Busboys & Poets.” This book changed my view of our country. It was part of the inspiration for Well Considered and continues to be an inspiration for my new novel (in progress), which is set in a sundown suburb of Cleveland.

Mr. Loewen will speak at the museum on Saturday May 19. For more information, call the museum at 301-209-0592

Earth Day in Kensington

Kensington International Day of the Book 2012

The sky drenched us with much-needed rain yesterday at the International Day of The Book in Kensington, Maryland (www.dayofthebook.com) but kept away the festival-goers. Booksellers under canopies offered their rich assortments of books, but few people braved the cold rain to explore them.

Richard Morris

I shared my stall with novelist David Levy, Author of Revolt of the Animals, a fellow resident of Hyattsville, Maryland. Down the street, another Hyattsville author, Julia Duin, offered her non-fiction books: Days of Fire and Glory: The Rise and Fall of a Charismatic Community;  Quitting Church: Why the Faithful are Fleeing and What to Do about It;  Waiting for True Love: And Other Tales of Purity, Patience, and Faithfulness (with Diana Magnuson);  andPurity Makes the Heart Grow Stronger: Sexuality and the Single Christian.

David Levy

Julia Duin

Despite the weather, we had an enjoyable experience, suffering together and having mushroom and barley soup and tuna fish sandwiches in the Tea Room across the street.

Thanks again to Elisenda Sola-Sole, who always does a great organizing job and who gave me my first festival opportunity just after I started this blog two years ago (reference past blogs “No Rain”  and “Pelicans in Kensington”). Al and his team also did a great job moving right in to help participants get their canopies erected in the rain.

The Little Red School House

The problem of prostitutes and Secret Service agents in Colombia reminds me of a poem:

The Little Red School House

It is not good for the G.I.’s health
To talk to the co below.
While the G.I. writhes, the co connives
And asks, “Where does your unit go?”
At the end of the fight is our G.I. stunned white
As he prays for his buddies’ salvation.
Then he says with a sigh, “A fool am I!
I told her my unit’s location.

Co = unmarried woman; used as a title, like “Miss”
Co Cong = female Viet Cong members

The danger today is that prostitutes will learn security secrets from the Secret Service agents.

The poem above was shared with me by Sam Heffner, a fellow Vietnam War veteran, in his review of my first novel, Cologne No. 10 For Men, which Heffner said “exudes realism that only someone who was there can appreciate and evaluate.  Indeed, when Mr. Minh ordered Can to ‘rent your body to the Americans… to find out for me where C company will go,’ [p. 118] it reminded me of the little card I handed out to the G.I.’s who fixed my jeep or whom as hitchhikers I taxied to town (from their airbase to Phan Thiet). On the card I had printed a little poem I entitled, ‘The Little Red School House.’”

Writer’s Digest calls Cologne No. 10 For Men “A superb novel of the Vietnam war… The writing crackles with authenticity.”

Beginning the book events for 2012…ASALH Authors’ Event

Johnnetta B. Cole

Saturday, February 25^th is the 86^th Annual Black History Month Luncheon of ASALH, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Although the luncheon is sold out, you can still attend the Featured Authors’ Booksigning Event, from 10:00 AM to 12:15 PM. It is free and open to the public.

This event is for authors with books related to the theme: Black Women in American Culture and History. I will be speaking one-on-one with people about my novel Well Considered and its depiction of black women dealing with interracial violence. Participating Authors and their works are listed below:

The location is The Renaissance Washington, DC Hotel, 999 9th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001. The featured speaker at the luncheon will be Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.  http://www.asalh.org/Annual_Luncheon.html

Did it happen here?

Hyattsville Author Richard Morris

Maryland is a southern state with a history of tobacco plantations, slaves, sharecropping, tenant farms, and Jim Crow. Harriett Tubman and Frederick Douglass were slaves here. There were forty-three lynchings, and school segregation survived into the nineteen seventies. There were attempts by the legislature to take away the black vote in 1905 and again in 1910. A Howard University professor was arrested for riding in the white section of a railroad car in Cecil County in 1905. I remember attending the last tobacco auction in Upper Marlboro a few years ago and seeing through thin paint the signs on the bathroom doors in the auction barn: “white” and “colored.” Prince George’s, now the most affluent majority African-American county in the country, was once a center for tobacco farming in the state. In recent history, county census data shows that nearly a third of a million white residents left the county between 1970 and 2000 – more than the population of Pittsburgh. There was massive white flight from school integration and busing…

In the current issue of The Hyattsville Life and Times, see the article entitiled “The secret history of Prince George’s County.” It focuses on my novel Well Considered and the history it describes.  The article was written by Julia Duin, president of the board of HL&T,  former religion editor for the Washington Times, and a frequent contributor to articles in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine. Click below to find the article. It’s on Page 7:

http://issuu.com/hyattsvillelifeandtimes/docs/hlt2012feb